With Easter rapidly advancing, chocolate sales will be growing along with the daylight hours. Perhaps, then, now is a good time to consider the importance of buying fair trade chocolate. We all know that buying fair trade is the right and humane action to take but do we all do it? There’s no denying the fact that ridiculously cheap supermarket offers on Easter eggs and the vast variety of characters, well known brands and fun images on mainstream Easter gifts are a strong temptation. While you and I may salivate at the mere mention of a Divine egg or some Booja Booja Easter truffles, children are more likely to want smarties, crème eggs, bunny rabbits and the like. And let’s face it Easter is predominantly for children. So how do we get around this?
One way to avoid filling the pockets of unethical chocolate suppliers is by encouraging children to appreciate cheap non-edible Easter gifts. Seeds or seedlings that can be grown into exciting looking/tasting plants would make a suitable alternative gift. Or perhaps funky gardening gloves, other outdoor tools and games, or a useful item of spring clothing that is both fun to receive and functional. These chicken and lamb tape measures are on my Easter wishlist and only cost as much as an averagely priced egg! A chocolate- free food gift could take it’s inspiration from my Nanna’s annual spring gift to me: she would fill a traditional-style Easter basket with packets of exotic and tasty dried fruit (banana chips, apple rings, dried pears and huge, juicy California raisins were my favourites!), topping it all off with a china bunny rabbit or other suitable ornament.
If chocolate gifts really are a pre-requisite for Easter celebrations in your family, perhaps you could lure youngsters away from colourfully packaged eggs with the fun of homemade goodies. Chocolate nests made with fair trade chocolate and cornflakes and filled with fair trade mini speckled eggs are easy and well loved by most. If you buy a mold (or saved plastic packaging from last year’s shop-bought Easter eggs), you could make your own fancy eggs that the children can decorate with icing, ribbons and bows, and even fill with little gifts or fair trade sweets for friends and family. Hot cross buns and traditional Easter biscuits all add to the kitchen fun. The joy of the activity may outweigh the desire for what the shops are offering.
Older children are less easy to divert from the pull of advertising and peer pressure. My daughter was more than content with homemade Easter treats and non-chocolate gifts when younger. Now her teens have made an appearance, the lure of the shops sometimes appears stronger than any influence I have! However, by this age I feel she is more than mature enough to understand why fair trade is so important and to temper personal desire with consideration for greater needs. This year I have given her various facts about how non fair trade chocolate gets to us and encouraged her to think about whether this bothers her and what our responsibilities are as consumers. I have told her that if she wants chocolate from me, she is only to expect fair trade. What other people give her is up to them. This seemed the best compromise to stay true to my own principles without inciting mutiny!
If you’re vacillating regards which Easter chocs to treat yourself and loved ones to, or are looking for hard facts to help family members understand why fair trade is so important, here is some humanitarian inspiration (followed by a list of yummy and ethical Easter eggs) for you to digest:
Fair Trade Facts To Consider
· Non fair trade chocolate often uses child labour. Children are tricked or forced into working on cocoa farms where they then work for long hours with no reward. Some are locked in at night with a tin can for a toilet, provided with very little food and are physically or mentally abused.
· The majority of children working on cocoa farms are under 14 years old. They are expected to do jobs such as spraying dangerous pesticides with no safe exposure level and using machetes.
· Children working on cocoa farms get little or no money. Some work to help their families, others are sent away from home.
· Most children who work on cocoa farms have never tasted chocolate and don’t even know that the cocoa beans they are growing will become chocolate.
· Many cocoa-farming families live in huts made from mud and sticks. Their villages may have no electricity or running water. Fair trade helps projects such as providing clean water wells.
· Approximately a third of children living in cocoa-producing families have never been to school. While many Western children resent school, here is the perspective of a Ghanaian boy who values such a privilege:
‘ Fair trade has changed my life – we can rely on getting a fair price for our beans, which means I am able to stay in school… My dream is to be a scientist and to look for cures to diseases.’
· Aproximately 12 million people are currently in slavery throughout the world. Chocolate is one of the industries that use slave labour. Mars and Nestle tend to buy large amounts of chocolate from Ivory Coast in Africa where it is hard to ensure that the cocoa is slavery free.
· Cocoa farmers receive only a small percentage of the final profit from the crop they have grown because there are so many other people in the chain before the cocoa beans become the packaged chocolate you see in the shops.
· Cocoa farmers are often paid by local cocoa buyers using cheques or vouchers, which the farmers then can’t cash, or which bounce. Even if they do get paid, they are often underpaid by local cocoa buyers using ‘fixed’ scales, set to show a lower reading than the actual weight of their cocoa beans.
· Cocoa plantations are often in remote areas with a harsh climate populated by poisonous spiders and scorpions. The cocoa blossoms are pollinated by midges.
Ethical Easter Eggs To Buy
Dubble – a milk chocolate egg with a chocolate and crisp rice bar.
Dubble Speckled Eggs – just like Cadbury’s mini eggs and not expensive.
Traidcraft mini milk chocolate or speckled eggs – some come in a gift mug
Green & Black’s Maya Gold – this is the only one of Green & Black’s eggs that is fair trade as well as organic.
Divine eggs – choose from dark, milk or white; big eggs or packs of mini ones.
Montezuma – not officially fair trade but their cocoa comes from well-paid co-operative plantations and their ethics are strong. Chocolate bunnies, mini and large dark, milk, caramel, praline and butterscotch eggs.
Chococo – they have a fun selection from honeycomb to dino-eggs to easter bunnies and hens, dark chocolate and milk chocolate with buttons. The eggs are pricey but the chocolate is ethical and handmade in the Purbecks.
Booja Booja – for the decadent amongst you, these are delicious champagne or hazelnut crunch truffles in a decorative keepsake egg.
Thorntons fair trade and organic – Thorntons have one fair trade egg in their range.
Kit Kat – now that Kit Kats are fair trade you may want to buy their Easter eggs.
Dairy Milk – another mainstream chocolate that is now fair trade.
If you’re making your own Easter eggs, Divine, The Co-Op, Plamil, Traidcraft, Montezuma, Chococo and some supermarkets sell fair trade chocolate bars that you can melt down.
Sources:
The BitterSweet World of Chocolate by Troth Wells and Nikki van der Gaag
The Good Shopping Guide
www.divinechocolate.com
www.papapaa.org
Categories: food
One thing I’m surprised not to see mentioned here is real eggs! When I was small my family kept geese and we’d blow and decorate goose eggs. My husband’s family tradition is to each have a hard-boiled egg on Easter morning, decorate them themselves with pens, and then have a sort of conker fight with them to see whose would be the last to crack.
Hi Oriel, I toyed with the idea of including Easter activities with real eggs but, with it being such an established tradition, decided I had nothing new to add. Like your husband, we have boiled eggs every Easter and like to decorate them with pens, paints, cotton wool, ribbons and anything else we can find. Last year we had a family egg decorating competition. Naturally, there was more than one winner! As a child, like you, I used to enjoy blowing and decorating eggs (though I often needed my dad’s help in blowing them!). I would put branches from the garden in a vase to make an Easter Tree on which I hung my decorated eggs with ribbons. A friend of mine still does something similar with pussy willow branches, which looks beautiful. This year I think I’d like to try natural-dying boiled eggs with beetroot, onion skins and other natural dyes, perhaps tying string around the eggs while they boil in the dye to create a tie-dye effect that would hopefully look good on the breakfast table. I hope you have a happy real-egg filled Easter and thanks for prompting me to mention the fun to be had with real eggs! Gem
Yes, I’d like to have a go at boil-dyeing too. As well as beetroot and onion skins, I suspect spinach would work. What else?
Stop Press! Since writing this piece, it has come to my attention that Greenpeace are claiming that Nestle’s production of KitKats is unethical through their use of rainforest palm oil. So that you can make your own mind up on the matter, here’s a link to their campaign: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/climate-change/kitkat Here’s to an ethical Easter!